


Human

by Pixeled



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Creation, M/M, Magic, ReeveBot, Sacrifice, creator, happiness, inherent magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28191072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixeled/pseuds/Pixeled
Summary: His creator sculpted him very carefully, equal parts machinery and magic. He doesn’t know how he knows what these things are, but he has memories. Some, anyway. Maybe they are just the important ones.
Relationships: Reeve Tuesti/Vincent Valentine
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Human

**Author's Note:**

> To Ellie Goulding’s “Human”, for @reevenation on Twitter

The sound of his heart is like a metronome. It beats at a steady 70 BPM no matter what.

He knows the feel of flesh because his creator has skin, and he too, has skin, he thinks. He knows what it’s like to feel with the pads of his finger tips because he’s touched his creator’s face, the rough texture of his beard, his own beard that mirrors it. He knows he looks exactly like his creator because when he was made, he suddenly awoke to a hazy din of lights and sounds. And then, clear as a horn that signifies the presence of fog, a voice came to him that cleared the fog away.He didn’t know then, but he was parts, not a whole, and he was shown a mirror to look. He was everything his creator was, but he needed a few missing pieces. Was this what it was like to be born?

His creator sculpted him very carefully, equal parts machinery and magic. He doesn’t know how he knows what these things are, but he has memories. Some, anyway. Maybe they are just the important ones. Mostly an infectious laugh, a woman he knows as Mother. There is a cloud of sadness hanging over the memory, and he knows she is no longer here. Where is here?

His awakening happened before he had arms, hands. But when he was complete he went out to feel the grass growing in the city that caged the concrete, clinging to the hope that life could be better than it was, and that was good. The sun on his face was good too. It felt like coming home. But wasn’t he already home?

He exists.

Or something like it.

Is that enough? Or does he want what his creator has. Does he have the capacity to want?

And while he looks like his creator he is _not_ his creator. He is _nothing_ like his creator. He is an echo. A whisper. A facsimile. He cannot create. He looks at his hands—the hands that look identical to his creator’s—and knows they are devoid of real purpose. He is somehow lacking parts, though that cannot be. He has done an inventory several times—everything is there. Then he realizes it is not that he lacks parts, but that the parts are lacking. They are pale imitations. They are are a make and model. They are not authentic. He is not authentic. And so when his creator gives him that bright smile that lights him up from within which is so _distinctly_ human, he can no longer muster the heart to smile back with purpose, because even though magic has given him a heart, and it pumps blood through him, he is cold and his heart is broken and that blood never quite returns to where it is supposed to, like a train that has no destination and runs out of steam, but there are no passengers, and nothing really lost.

The sun feels good, but the darkness that envelopes him shields him from its brightness. He sees a child cry and he understands now, the thing that has been welling up within him like a sea that wants to rise up like a tsunami. But he cannot cry. He is incapable, he feels. He tried a thousand times since then, because he thinks it will feel better than being numb and silent, but it never works. Did his creator make him with this lack in mind? Was he always to be happy?

He does not feel happy, and that makes him feel guilty. He should feel grateful. He is technically alive. These are emotions, he recognizes, but they are not the emotions he wants nor craves with his whole being, and he is sure it would make his creator feel like he has failed, so he is silent. He never lets on that he is slowly falling apart even though nothing is technically wrong.

The thought echos in his head.

_I would give my life to be human._

But he is not prepared for the end, as he has just begun.

He wants to ask what it is he was made for, but he does not. He lies awake at night thinking of all the things that he might build with his hands if he could, and the ideas flash like fireworks behind his eyelids and he feels some semblance of desire, but it is cruel because he does not have the power his creator does—to breathe life with his pure intentions into what is metal and rigid and to make all the hard edges fade into the soft and delicate fine flesh and bone of…human?

He is not human. He knows it as sure as he recognizes, somehow, that those surrounding him _are_ human—that his creator has a gift that others do not.

His creator’s heart is variable. The sound of it is soothing when he presses his face to his chest. He is warm when he is under the covers with him—almost like a furnace, whereas he is a steady temperature that is not quite right.

He knows he is not quite right. His smile mirrors his creator’s, and happens at the appropriate time, but only because he has studied his creator. Deep down, he wonders if he is capable of smiling not because he _feels_ like a smile is needed, but because he feels it come to his face unbidden. Perhaps he does it to create the illusion that he is okay. That nothing is wrong. That he was made perfectly.

Perhaps he was not made perfect.

Perhaps all he has is mimicry.

He is _not_ human.

But he can behave like one if that means he can be someone.

He does not know if he has a soul. He does not know how he knows what a soul is. Is this something only humans possess? He knows there is river of glowing green on a different plane where souls pass into a bridge between life and death. But he is neither, so will he live forever? Or will he disappear one day in the blink of an eye just as he came into this existence? A human eye, he guesses, for surely his eyes do not function the same. Does he see color the same? Can he be dismantled? Is he all parts, not a whole? Will his creator never tell him what he was made for? Get tired and take him apart one day? Or will he exist just long enough to see his creator fade from the planet and be forced to leave with him as if he never existed? Surely he will not leave a legacy. But his creator will.

He has so many questions, but his creator is very busy and very important. He does not want to constantly ask the questions that churn in his mind.

Is it a mind he has?

He was made by a human. But humans make other humans in a different way.

A woman named Tifa explains this to him and he cannot help but think it is messy and chaotic. Those are things he is not. Or at least he thinks he isn’t.

This Tifa, she has a sympathetic face, eyes sparkling umber and rimmed with honey and a smile that hides a weariness that is bone deep, and that is safe and sad, because she is motherly in a way, though not like his (creator’s?) Mother. She is caring and loving and puts herself below every other priority, just like his creator.

He wonders what that voice that he hears swirling around him is. He can hear her thoughts. That is something new. He cannot hear his creator’s thoughts.

Meeting her is strange. He has a feeling he likes her, but he doesn’t know what that is based on. She feels familiar and comfortable, like a blanket that falls all around you and is tucked close as if you know already it is comfortable and shielding from the harshness of the world. She says this is because they’re friends, but how can they be friends if they just met? His thoughts ask if he’s like another. Another she is fond of, but who is not human.

He meets the little bipedal cat with purple fur, so soft. He lets him touch him, and the feeling is almost electric. He is special. In all the world he is the only one of his kind. He knows this and he wears it like a kind of proud armor. He knows who he is and where he does not know he supplements it with wit. He is loud and happy and childlike, and he knows he is happy because he is laughing and dancing and totally uninhibited. He is happy beyond the mere concept of it. This is no dictionary definition he has no example of. And knowing a concept but not feeling it is lonely. He does not know how he knows this. He just does.

This Cait Sith, he is curious and questions everything around him, asks it of anyone he can glean knowledge from. He interacts and seems to understand, seems to have empathy and laughs like a carillon, musical. He is more human than he is in so many ways, and yet he is not shaped like a human, which perplexes him.

What is happy? Is it resting with his creator on languid Saturday mornings bolstered by the smell of strong black coffee and listening to his creator talk excitedly about his hopes and dreams, the way he loves how things work, the way it can all be pulled apart and then put back together like a puzzle? But even on Saturdays he leaves, called to do something important. Still, Saturdays are his favorite days because his creator seems less like a piston that moves tirelessly, like the tension in him bleeds out of his shoulders like the hiss of an engine that constantly churns and stops only for short reprieves when it it is recalibrated.

His creator is human, but he is more machine than human in ways, but only because he makes sacrifices and toils tirelessly. He knows what sacrifice is somehow (is it a memory?), and he knows his creator is making up for something that happened he does not feel happy about, that he feels responsible for. Happiness is easiest to understand, so sadness comes as no surprise because it is the opposite. He realizes his creator is lonely then, and that when he curls around him and holds him tight, he is perhaps imagining someone else. Someone far away.

He lies awake one night, and he hears a name. There is such reverence in it. Is that love?

Cait takes him on what he calls adventures. He climbs a mountain with him, and is introduced to the clay face of the mountain lit up by the red sun descending into the horizon and it makes the sky a multitude of colors he has never experienced with such vivid intensity. The colors spread and shift like watercolors, an artist’s creation. Is that what he is? An artist’s creation? And though he should feel moved by the beauty of the world he only feels like a small speck on the big face of an angry god.

Cait Sith says he is the fifth of his kind. He tells him he has all the memories of the others before him, each “death”. He says it’s like coming online again after an outage. His creator makes him the same every time. His creator thinks he removes some of the memories that might hurt, because he loves each iteration of his beloved creation, but Cait doesn’t want to tell him he remembers it all. He is careful of their creator’s feelings. He says their creator will keep making iterations of him, but that he does not last forever. He dies and gets replaced, but when their creator dies, he will die too. He is not bothered by this somehow.

Cait tells him that their creator is lonely and sad underneath the smiles, the laughs, the endless work that makes the world turn after it was supposed to end. He busies himself as much as he can because there is someone he loves who goes missing a lot, and he never knows where he goes. Cait says the name and it is the same name he heard their creator sigh in his sleep, and he gets a flash of red and black in his memories, and a feeling that stabs him in the chest and suddenly his heart rate is not 70 BPM but at least 100, but probably more.

He sees pale skin, the face of what looks like an expertly crafted moving marble statue, a pair of glowing red eyes that constantly dart and scan for threats beneath heavy black lashes that cast shadows on high cheekbones and a band of red that almost covers half his face, the neck of a cloak cowl so high up that he can hide his mouth and the tip of his nose beneath it if he so wishes. He has a way of bending his long thin body, constantly curling inward like he thinks he can disappear or shrink, but he is tall, he is seen, so he hides the best he can, and roams the planet endlessly like a vagabond, a restless lonely soul, which is a contradiction he cannot fathom.

But perhaps he can.

He realizes in that moment he is in love with someone he has never met.

Finally he asks his creator about the man who is embedded in his memories, about what he was created for, and he tells him to go searching for this man in a part of the world he knows nothing about but somehow his feet carry him there, and amongst the crystalline trees he is there, perched like a corvid, shining brilliantly in reprieve. He blinks slowly, tilts his head, and it only adds to the comparison.

“Reeve?”

“An approximation. Of sorts.”

Another blink.

He tells him why he’s come. His heart pounds in his chest. It sounds like the passionate beat of a loud tribal drum, ancient and holy. It has certainly never done _that_ before. And at the corners of his eyes, his lashes are wet with the emotion he feels, and he feels more human than he has ever felt in the presence of this man, though neither of them is human.

Reeve Tuesti, the man, the commissioner, the creator, the engineer, the maker of the known current world—he has devoted his life to making the world a better place, fixing what was almost irrevocably broken, and has no room for the kind of love he wants to give Vincent Valentine, but Reeve Tuesti the creation he breathed to life and gave the lifespan of eternity can love Vincent Valentine without reservation, can give him what he needs, and together they can try to be someone.

Happy.

Human.


End file.
